The Blue Collar CEO: My Gutsy Journey from Rookie Contractor to Multi-Millionaire Construction Boss

By Mandy Rennehan

WINNER of the Dartmouth Book Awards, First Book Award (Non-Fiction)

The “respectfully uncensored” story of how Mandy Rennehan’s savvy business skills and innovative thinking led her to the top of the male-dominated construction industry before the age of thirty

Born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Mandy Rennehan began her business career at the age of ten by catching bait and selling it to local fishermen. She was so good at her job, she knew she wanted to be her own boss one day. At the age of seventeen, Rennehan decided to strike out on her own, so she packed a hockey bag full of her belongings and fled to Halifax, where she began cold calling construction companies, volunteering to work for free, so she could learn more about contracting and the trades.

Three years later, Rennehan had garnered all the experience she needed to start her own company, Freshco, a boutique retail maintenance and construction company. Still in her early twenties, Rennehan’s reputation as a knowledgeable and trustworthy contractor led to her first corporate contract with The Gap. Her business has since gone on to become a multi-million-dollar company whose clients are some of the top corporations in North America.

Known as the Blue Collar CEO for her ability to seamlessly navigate between the white- and blue-collar worlds, and as a tireless advocate for the trades, this is the story of how Rennehan succeeded in business through honesty, integrity, and most of all, authenticity—by always remaining true to herself and her vision for success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781443461948

Mandy Rennehan

MANDY RENNEHAN is a sought-after speaker, philanthropist, award-winning entrepreneur and trade-industry ambassador who runs a multi-million-dollar retail maintenance and construction company called Freshco (not the grocery store). As a business leader, her personal passion is promoting the trades as a career option for men and women. In Canada, Rennehan is a lead advisor in the federal government’s national campaign to encourage apprenticeships and promote the skilled trades. She has received numerous business awards, including Canada’s Most Admired CEO, the Toronto Region Board of Trade Business Leader of the Year Award, the RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Momentum Award and a Top 25 Women of Influence Award, and is a five-time winner of Canada's Most Powerful Women Top 100 Award from the Women's Executive Network. She is also the host of HGTV’s newest renovation show, Trading Up with Mandy Rennehan.

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Prologue

Success = Ma on Her Mower

Ma had just turned seventy. She took a zero turn, quick and smooth, on the John Deere commercial mower I’d sprung for. It was another beautiful July day in seaside Nova Scotia, where Ma spends half her time mowing the lawn of my 18-acre compound in Yarmouth—with its blow-your-mind views of the Bay of Fundy—and the other half willing the grass to grow. Faster. She loves the mowing that much. We call that machine her later-in-life best friend.

There she was, in her happy place, absorbed in cutting those even rows. She had no idea I was there.

I waited for her to finish a long stretch, then crept up behind her on my buggy. I got right up close. She pulled another sharp turn and found herself facing me, head on.

Mandy Dawn! she screeched.

She wanted to mow me over. Just this once. I could tell. But instead, with a big saucy grin, she bounced around me and drove off to finish the row.

The sun was high on that hill. Her skin was bright pink. I yelled, Ma, you look like a lobster in a pot that somebody forgot about!

She idled the machine, looked back at me through her grass-covered glasses, her fifteen-year-old Blue Jays World Series hat askew atop her head, and said, You listen here, Mandy! You mind your business and leave me and my boyfriend here, John Deere, alone.

I roared laughing. She zipped off. A bit of my heart—a happy, contented, grateful bit—went with her.

Not three minutes later, I heard another motor. It was Pup, my dad, making his way up the long driveway, riding side saddle at 65 kilometres an hour on our property’s four-wheeler, the landscape cart in tow. Yes, side saddle. And as full of himself as the rooster that got you out of bed at 5 a.m.

Had anyone asked me when I was young what my markers for success would be, I doubt seeing my mother on a tractor or Pup zooming by on a four-wheeler would have topped the list. But when I talk to young people and they ask me what’s best about growing older, I say to them, Who the hell doesn’t want to be a millionaire? The kids’ teachers will tell me no one’s quite taken that approach before. But I frame it for them this way: it’s not about the money; it’s not about getting rich. It’s that maybe, someday, you could send your parents on a trip they couldn’t otherwise afford. You could buy someone you love, who’s struggling, something they need. I make it about giving. One of the kids will say, Yeah, I could buy my parents a new house. And I tell them that’s just what I did when I became a millionaire: I bought my mom and dad a house.

Now, my folks don’t live together on that big seaside acreage anymore. They’re no longer married. But they both take care of it—they’ve even found a kind of peace with each other in the project. They’re remarkably able to put their differences aside to work on the windmill property. (Keep your pants on. I’ll tell you all about the windmill later.)

The truth is, my mission, from as far back as I can remember, has been to make my parents’ lives easier. Mowing that acreage brings out a joy and assertiveness in Ma, a real contentment that I never saw enough of growing up. Building a multi-million-dollar business, as a female and as a lesbian, in an industry that still, three decades into my career, barely knows what to do with either, has been hard, to say the least. You wouldn’t credit how hard. Some people go through life in the left lane of a busy freeway without a speed limit or off-ramps. So much for the lucky few. The rest of us find ourselves on dirt roads full of potholes and deep ditches.

At times, I’ve wondered if I was on a road at all.

But has it been worth it?

Show me Ma, fierce and proud, whipping around out there on her tractor. Give me a glimpse of Pup zipping past on the four-wheeler, happy as a clam. Then ask me that question again.

1

Staple Your Hems and Face the Piper

What’s your first move when you really don’t know what to do next? You call your Newfoundland friend.

She answered on the first ring, as if she could feel the urgency. San Francisco, I told her. The Paris of North America. The Golden Gate Bridge.

Most importantly, though, I told her this: the Gap had come calling. I laid out the opportunity in my best this is the real deal voice. I needed her to understand how bloody serious this was. There are things you’ll never have a second chance at. This trip would be my ticket, the genesis of my actual career, the one I’d been building toward.

Or it wouldn’t.

My life was about to change, one way or the other.

I was twenty-four years old, an entrepreneur from small-town Nova Scotia on her way up. Way up. Sprung, in all my unlikely splendour, straight out of Canada’s Maritimes. And I wasn’t just some ordinary businesswoman to contend with. I was a one-woman revolution in the making, a visionary, kickass lesbian in the trades—a lesbian rethinking the trades, the whole goddamn construction industry, thank you very much.

Of course the Gap had come calling. I know, right?

Underneath that, though, I was a lobster fisherman’s daughter who’d started out catching bait in the Bay of Fundy. I’d worked for years as a farmhand, feeding and—I’m not kidding you—herding cows on local farms. I’d spent what seemed (to me) like a lifetime of night shifts mopping layers of beer and puke off the floors of Halifax pubs. San Francisco? The Gap? Seriously? I’d never set foot on the US West Coast. Shit, I’d turned twenty-one before I’d eaten my first garden salad. Now I was about to fly cross-continent to make a pitch to take over facilities maintenance for every one of this retail giant’s 230-plus Canadian stores.

Holy check-your-pants shit.

Midway through my spiel to my friend, I heard a commotion in the background.

Okay, I said. What the hell are you doing?

Jeez, b’y! I’m packing my shit and coming on that plane with you!

For anyone unlucky enough to have never set foot on The Rock on Canada’s East Coast, b’y is Newfoundland English for boy, which, further, is Newfoundland English for buddy or friend. An outsider needs a sharp ear—and maybe a translator—to make their way in that glorious salt-caked land.

Newfoundland wasn’t asking. She was telling. And it sounded like she was throwing everything she owned, plus her Aunt Lucy besides, into her suitcase.

I haven’t come across many people who could make me laugh more easily than Newfoundland. She was the sort who held nothing back. You never had to wonder what she was thinking. That’s my kind of person. Real.

She flew into Halifax to meet me. We had a few hours before the flight to California. Once there, we’d head straight from the airport to Gap’s headquarters. But as she approached me out of her arrivals gate, she looked me up and down and said, Yeah, you’re not going into that meeting with those clothes on, my friend.

I was in jeans (ripped), work boots, and a hoodie. Job site clothes. Okay, my clothes. Period. My hair was pulled back, but not with flair—just to get it the hell out of my face.

Newfoundland shook her head. You’ve got to look respectable.

The next thing you know, we were zipping through the city and pulling up to a Reitmans store. That’s right, Reitmans. Where else could I get the female corporate look on a shoestring budget? I have always hated shopping, and I detest trying on clothes. It just feels like a waste of time: there’s always something else I could be doing. But I trusted her intentions. I sucked it up. My friend pushed me around that store like she was on a mission. She picked out the most professional-looking shirt and pants she could find—and got me into them. The pants were a bit long, but they’d do. I walked up to the cash fully clad in my new duds and paid for what I was wearing. We ripped the tags off and headed back to the airport.

I should have spent my time on that long flight focusing on the meeting, but, dammit, the breath coming off the guy next to me could have peeled the carpet off the floor. And I was too nervous to eat a full meal. By the time the plane landed, I was full of peanuts and cheap coffee—and swearing I would never again, as long as I lived, let anyone book me into a middle seat on an airplane. (I have kept that promise.) We caught a cab to the company’s building near the waterfront, a stunning modern structure with chunky cube-style layers and echoes of old warehouses in its design: brick walls filled with rows of vast grilled windows. We stood outside and stared, then looked at each other and broke out into great big, nervous grins.

I was in San Francisco, about to meet with senior executives representing what was, at that time, the biggest retailer in the world.

This was happening.

Suddenly, I was sweating like Trump trying to form a sentence. I had never done anything like this before. However, by this point new territory was a daily occurrence for me. My young company was growing, fast: I was doing a million dollars’ worth of business a year, including, already, the maintenance for forty of Gap’s Canadian locations. If I landed this contract my company’s annual takings would leap—overnight—to five million dollars. Didn’t the Great One, Gretzky, tell us you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take? I knew my shit. That was why I was here. I had one shot. And I was aiming for the net.

We made our way inside. The place was hopping with people rushing back and forth. This young guy armed with a headset and a clipboard hurried down the hallway to get us.

Hey, Canada, he said. We’re running behind. You’ve got seven minutes.

Then he turned and walked away.

Newfoundland looked at me and blurted, What a dick! Inside, I agreed with her. He was totally dickish. We’re East Coasters, after all. We’re all about making people feel welcome. If the tables had been turned, Mr. Pressed Khakis would have been presented with a cold craft beer and a lobster sandwich, with a few East Coast jokes thrown in for good measure.

But holy shit. There were all these people around, and her voice carried—way more loudly than I was comfortable with. I had to shush her. You can’t say that here!

I shook off my irritation. Had to. It was game time. I walked toward those double doors like I was the one who’d actually called the meeting.

Holy crap, Bear. Stop!

I swung around. Newfoundland said in a harsh whisper, Lord thundering Jesus, both hems fell out of your pants. You can’t go in like that!

It was a classic case of you get what you pay for. I must have stepped on them while I was sitting down, or getting up—remember how they were too long?—and snagged the hems. I was uncomfortable in those clothes as it was. My feet, stuffed into these smart little shoes we’d bought, were killing me. Newfoundland sent me to the washroom. As I turned, I saw her spin sideways and dive into a nearby office. My seven minutes were racing by. I told myself to breathe. I’d barely finished the thought when she joined me—with a smile, and a loaded weapon.

A stapler.

I had no words. But Newfoundland, bent over and fumbling with the bottoms of my pants, sure did. Holy shit, b’y, you’ve got to jump up on the counter so I can see what I’m doing.

I hopped up and sat. Right smack in a pool of water. The woman before me must have had a serious hot flash. There was water everywhere. I imagined her standing there in a mad panic, splashing water all over, trying to cool herself off. Thank God my pants were black, because my arse was soaked.

Newfoundland and I started to laugh.

But the clock was ticking. She got to work with the stapler. Thirty seconds later, my pants were hemmed. Then she had me back up against the hand dryer—the shitty kind they had in those days, that would barely ruffle the hair on a mosquito’s head. We grabbed wads of those useless, stiff paper towels you once found in every public washroom, and she had her hands all over my arse, trying to soak up the water.

My seven minutes had turned to four. I gave Newfoundland a look that was probably half-deranged. I have to get in there.

She looked me square in the face and said, You got this.

Back in the hallway she nodded in the direction of Mr. Khaki Pants. She knew what I was thinking. She leaned in and whispered, Don’t worry about him. If he tries to go near that door before you’re finished, I’ll take his headphones and ram them up his—

I didn’t hear the rest, because I was walking toward the meeting room: me and my stapled pants and my sopping wet butt and my Canadian East Coast personality.

When those giant doors opened, it was as dramatic as the parting of the Red Sea. The first person I saw was the big guy, Francisco, the Gap’s senior vice-president of sourcing and procurement. He stood, and I looked up. I wouldn’t be far off if I said I stood a groundhog above his belly button. That’s how tall he was. The pinching dress shoes that I’d quickly come to hate added next to nothing to my short stature.

He smiled. Hi, Mandy Rennehan. How are you?

I shook his hand and then made my way around the room, shaking more hands. The boardroom table, at least 25 feet long, was made of some exotic, flawless wood and was surrounded by high-backed leather chairs that clearly didn’t come from Staples (no offence intended). The view from the room’s massive windows took in the Oakland Bay Bridge. I was briefly rattled by the thought of how much this view must cost. Then I turned my attention to the business at hand.

I faced a group of men, five of them. They looked perfectly at home around that pricy table. Professional. Intimidating. And yet, something in me said, I’ll have ya warmed up in no time, boys.

Francisco smiled at me. You come very, very highly recommended, he began. I’m interested in what you have to say.

I swallowed hard. I remembered the promise I’d made to myself: to always be me, the real Mandy. I would never try to be the person I thought they were expecting.

Well, it’s a good thing, I said, with what I hoped was my most winning smile. Because, you know what? Canadian lesbians don’t travel to San Francisco all dressed up like this for just any guys.

Dead silence. The five men stared at me. Their faces didn’t crack for the longest three seconds of my life.

* * *

The key to a great lobster catch comes in the form of a little fish that travels upstream with lots and lots of friends. That tiny creature lives at sea but spawns in fresh water. In the bustling metropolis of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, where I grew up—population just 8,500, but it’s a community that boasts Atlantic Canada’s biggest and most diverse fishery—we call this little fish a kayak. It’s also known as a gaspereau or an alewife. But no matter what you call them, they’re akin to a five-star Michelin meal to our precious crustaceans, drawing them in like an East Coaster to a fried baloney sandwich on squishy white bread.

As a kid, I was keenly aware of the importance of this little fish to the well-being of our family.

There’s nothing quite like growing up as the daughter of a lobster fisherman in a family of six in a community that relies heavily on the seasonal, unreliable fishing industry. In the late 1970s and early 1980s of my childhood, lobster was the furthest thing from a so-called delicacy. It was known as poor man’s food. And those who caught and sold it barely got by. In our household, we were always trying to beat our way through what life threw at us. Flared tempers were normal, worry was second nature, and anxiety came and went with the tides. Where was the next cheque coming from? How was the next bag of groceries going to make it to the table? Where would we find the money to put gas in the car? And let’s not think about what would be under the Christmas tree—Christmas really was the time for miracles. We kids came to believe in them, because as far as we knew there was just no other way those gifts could have appeared beneath the tree.

Born in 1975 on a typical stormy day in Rockville, just down the rocky coastline from Yarmouth, I’m Mandy to Ma, Bear to friends, and Sis to my brothers and Pup. I showed up five years after my older brother Troy, and seven years after the eldest, Chris. I spent the nine months before I was born with my twin, Trev, living in a 1970s rendition of a cramped studio apartment with a belly button for a doorbell. I don’t know what the hell went on in there, but beyond our later mutual love for Ma’s jam-in-the-middle sugar cookies (and thick-ass egg sandwiches on squishy white bread), we came out so polar opposite that you’d never guess we were twins.

We don’t look alike. We don’t have the same personality. Trev always loved watching sports and placing bets with the boys. I, on the other hand, couldn’t tell you who was playing what sport on television because I was on the field or court playing the sports myself. While Trev was memorizing the Wheel of Fortune answers on his Xbox so his buddies would think he was smarter than they were, I was dreaming of a life outside of Yarmouth.

My twin was quiet as quiet could be. I was boisterous and full of questions.

We’ve all experienced someone like me in our lives—that kid who asks why and keeps asking why with every answer. My hunger for knowledge was insatiable. Why do cows get milked in the morning? Why does hay have to be bailed? Why do lobsters love to eat kayaks? The how questions were even more unending, because I just had to know how to do everything that needed doing.

I was lucky no one shooed me away. The adults, God bless them, just kept answering my questions. Or trying to. My parents did their best, after all. They never put up barriers for me. And there was never so much as the tiniest hint or suggestion that I take any of our hardships on myself. Home was a safe place: three meals a day, a bed to sleep in, and a side order of brothers to torment the shit out of me. But the struggles we lived through as a family drove me to strive for a different life. What I lacked was a mentor. Who was I going to learn from? Mentorship in my day consisted of Pup or Ma pointing at the door and hollering, Get yer arse outside and get the stink blown off ya! Supper will be ready at 5.

Talk about Resilience-Building 101.

Okay, so I had no mentor. But I had myself. My own take on life. Which was definitely—how do I put this?—not quite what everyone expected when I was born: me, the first and only girl in the whole extended family, on both sides. When I showed up there was so much excitement I was practically smothered in bows and frills. Everyone invested in pink. Little did they know.

I was a tomboy from the very beginning. For me, wearing a dress was akin to Superman wearing a pair of kryptonite socks. Get it off me! Obviously there was more to this than just tomboy tendencies, but no one, least of all me, knew it.

Everything in its time.

Meanwhile, I had ideas. I had plans. I was never embarrassed when I couldn’t do something the first time. I’d keep at a task until I had it mastered. (Did I mention I came out breech? Ma has never let me forget it.) I had a bottomless need to make things better. By the age of ten, I may not have been able to articulate it, but the entrepreneur in me was jumping up and down, waving her arms, begging me to give her the attention she deserved. Watching Pup relentlessly working at fishing until he fought to keep his eyes open, could barely put one foot in front of the other—that had awakened a sleeping giant in me. My ambition was peskier than a blackfly looking for a snack at bedtime. I knew I had to find a way to help.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what to do. It called for kayaks. Lots and lots of kayaks.

It’s not that I wasn’t a kid who loved to do kid stuff—I was, and I did—but while other kids were busy with Red Rover, Red Rover, I started building real-life teams. While they were fishing in the creek for something to do, I cast my net in the river to see a profit.

* * *

The plan was simple and brash. I had two things going for me: personality and athletic ability. There wasn’t a sport I couldn’t play, and the boys all wanted me on their teams. I always got picked first, because I was better than they were. So I rounded up four local guys and told them, I’ll be your winger for the hockey game this weekend, but you gotta dip kayaks with me.

Sold. It was a done deal, just like that. Bargaining rule number one: never downplay your assets and talents.

We had to wait for low tide, when the fish were swimming upstream. Tides are always shifting, and, around the time of our scheme, the lowest tide was pretty late, around 10 p.m. I don’t know what tricks the boys used for sneaking out. I manoeuvred around our home’s squeaky floorboards the way the Road Runner skirted Acme bombs. Beep, beep! The idea was to escape unseen so we wouldn’t have to shift to Plan B, which was to run like hell so our arses wouldn’t get whooped.

We made our own dip nets with bent wood instead of steal. We’d tie the wood into a circle, install hooks for the bait bags, and fasten them to long arms we could extend over the wide Chegoggin River. The kayaks struggling heroically upstream swim right in, and you haul your catch back to shore. In some places, the water was shallow enough that you could wade out a little way. Our favourite spot was down from Cranberry Hill, just upriver from a group of my brothers’ friends, older kids who were always complaining about having to do the work. Nothing burns my arse more than lazy people. So I figured